Starlings and nested songs

Noam Chomsky pegged “recursive grammar” as the unique feature of human speech. We can recognize speech patterns that are defined by nested structures (“The cat that the sitter that the service that I called hired fed died,” or “What did you bring a book I didn’t even want to be read out of to up for?”), in which the final piece of the pattern may be arbitrarily far from the initial piece.

Now it seems we aren’t alone. Starlings can be trained to recognize and produce recursive song patterns. They get it, when they are rewarded for an arbitrarily long string of rattle calls followed by an equal number of warble calls. It’s a skill that’s been tested and found lacking in tamarin monkeys, but starlings are up to it.

A long long trail to Iranian A-bombs

When they tell you Iran could have nukes any minute now, reply that they can’t get ‘em for years, probably not until “into the next decade”. Who says? Bush’s own Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, that’s who. The transcript of his National Press Club briefing is also, at least for now, on Negroponte’sDNI site.

Bush is listening. Use big words.

[On edit: The title phrase did not originate with me. If you're looking for bumper stickers and other paraphernalia, try this site. But y'all come back, hear?]

You may have heard about the suit Electronic Frontier Foundation brought against AT&T, claiming that they’re running all their Internet traffic in selected cities through the NSA.

The class-action suit, which seeks an end to the collaboration it alleges, is based in part on the testimony of Mark Klein, a retired technician for the company who says Internet data passing through an AT&T switching center in San Francisco is being diverted to a secret room. There, Mr. Klein says, the security agency has installed powerful computers to eavesdrop without warrants on the digital data and forward the information to an undisclosed place.

Now the Feds are trying to quash the suit (U.S. Steps Into Wiretap Suit Against AT&T), by invoking the State Secrets Privilege. They’re saying EFF mustn’t be allowed to introduce its evidence that the NSA is in gross violation of the law, because then the gummint would have to deny it, and saying out loud whether or not the NSA stands in massive breach of the fourth amendment would be giving Osama TMI.

Glenn Greenwald provides his usual astute analysis of the State Secrets Privilege, its history and its abuse potential, in “Building the Secrecy Wall Higher and Higher“. (Fair warning: it’s long.)

A mathematical farmer’s market

Every few weeks since ‘92 or so, first on Usenet, now on the Web, John Baez of U Cal Riverside has published This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics. He slogs through the original research papers so you don’t have to, and then he explains the good parts. I’ve just added it to my link list.

Why do I call it a “farmer’s market”? Because it’s always fresh and tasty, it comes from many fields and vineyards, and he gives it his own local flavor. The intended audience is fools like me: with an undergrad degree in math or physics, and a desire to deceive ourselves into thinking that we’re keeping up. If it’s to do with string theory or quantum gravity, he’s on it.His gifts for exposition, and for fun, are enormous.

This week he takes up the quincuncial mapping of the sphere (see figure) and its connection to rational tangles. His homepage has links to other good stuff.

A problem from hell

(With not very abject apologies to Samantha Power.) There’s a march in DC this Sunday, to press the government to get international troops in to stop the genocide in Darfur.

This shouldn’t be, and I think is not, a partisan issue at all. When Clinton failed to step into Rwanda, it was not just a shame for the Democratic party, but for America. And as near as I can tell, the Bush administration is in the throes of the same kind of non-partisan lassitude, born not of ideology but of inertia.

If you can be there, great. If not, MoveOn is sponsoring a virtual march. You can click on through and sign their petition.

Britannica helps you rate your democracy

The King of Zembla blog pointed the way to this 9 minute Encyclopedia Britannica classroom film from the 50s. (Video and sound, DSL highly recommended.) Not appearing today in any civics classroom near you, but you can try out this simple democracy / despotism scale at home on the country of your choice, say countries with initials like U.S.A. or I.r.a.q.

Black holes are green

The idea’s been around for a long time. Misner Thorne and Wheeler’s classic 1973 text Gravitation explained in Chapter 33 how to use a black hole to convert your garbage into electricity with astounding efficiency. They had a neato diagram of the ringworld civilization, the BH, and the trajectory of the garbage rocket.

A NASA press release Monday tells us we’ve proved it’s happening out there. The X-ray observatory Chandra was able to measure the efficiency of a black hole engine, which uses infalling gas as fuel to power a process that scoops out humongous cavities in the black hole’s surrounding material. (Here’s a larger photo.) Equivalent efficiency in a car engine would give you an EPA rating of a billion miles per gallon.

Cape Wind has an Alanis moment

Isn’t it ironic?

Ted Kennedy drops the ball, doing perhaps the only truly sleazy thing he’s ever done as a Senator. And it backfires. Even when the guy does bad, he can’t help doing good.

Cape Wind is the country’s first truly major wind power project, to be based offshore in Nantucket Sound. On completion, it’ll furnish electricity for 3/4 of Cape Cod, and enable the Bay State to meet its modestly ambitious renewable energy goals for the next decade. It’s met intense opposition from wealthy beachfront homeowners on the Cape, and Kennedy has been leading the NIMBY pack, with Republican governor Mitt Romney nipping at his heels, trying to vie for the pack’s alpha male spot.

Nevertheless, after years of wrangling, and resolution of initial fears about environmental effects on birds and fish, Cape Wind was on its way to approval. Then came the sleaze. Two Alaskan reps, Young and Stevens, slipped an amendment into the must-pass Coast Guard spending authorization bill, which would give the governor of a state final veto power over any offshore wind plans in the state’s coastal waters, regardless of how many reviews and hoops it had jumped through. Kennedy gave the end-run his blessing, and started lining up Democratic support for the amendment in the Senate.

Then came the gas prices.

Today the Boston Globe reports that New Mexico GOP senators Bingaman and Domenici have started rounding up support for Cape Wind in the upper house. Now, where energy is concerned, these are two bad actors. They are behind the worse of the two fake global warming bills I blogged about two days ago. But the gas prices are putting the heat on them to start looking green. An electorate rapidly arming itself with pitchforks seems likely to demand from them outrageous acts of disloyalty to the oily hand that feeds them, like maybe a repeal of last summer’s $14.1 billion tax break.

Suddenly, the perfect solution drops into their hands: not only can they substitute free wind for a windfall tax, not only can they pose as environmental heroes – they can poke a sharp stick in Ted Kennedy’s eye at the same time! It’s like dangling a wabbit in front of Elmer Fudd, or a new war in front of George Junior. How could they resist?

So the House bill is suddenly sidelined for several weeks, and Greenpeace gets to enjoy the company of some strange new bedfellows.

Update: Commenter Over the Left Shoulder is right: I hadn’t been that familar with Bingaman, but he is (D-NM), not (R-NM). And he’s ordinarily a pretty good eco-actor. I see his ratings from League of Conservation Voters have run in the 70 and 80 percent range, and he helped vote down the latest ANWR drilling proposal. Still, EMK’s handprints on the Cape Wind killer amendment will make it easier for Domenici to round up GOP votes against it.

Did I mention the Black Iron Prison?

Tucked away into an intelligence bill just introduced into the House, Section 423 of H.R. 5020, is a provision authorizing the CIA and the NSA to make arrests, “for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States, if such personnel have probable cause to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing that felony offense.”

Not one, but two, secret police forces will soon be law. Once they’ve set up the KGB, will they bother to tell us when they’re setting up Lubyanka?

A tip of the nicteis wing to the Federation of American Scientists for the catch.

A real global warming bill – and two fakes

Senators McCain (R-AZ) and Lieberman (D-CT) aren’t my favorite lawmakers. But I have to give them big chops for foresight and persistence on this one.

After proposing a global warming bill which failed less spectacularly than you’d think (it got 47 votes in 2003), they’re back with the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2005 (S. 1151). (The link isn’t to the act itself, but to a meaty summary of its contents by Pew Research.) It would mandate a cap-and-trade system on carbon dioxide emissions which would require a return to 2000 levels within 10 years. Revenues from the system would be plowed into new technology.

Since the public is really beginning to wake up, the energy industry recognizes that there is some risk of real action. Therefore, two alternate bills have been introduced by friends of the fiends who are administering a hotfoot to our children. The first, from Dianne Feinstein, slims down McCain-Lieberman to an ineffectual shadow of its former self. The second, from Bingaman and Domenici, would call itself an anti-global-warming bill, but would actually be designed to accelerate the production of CO2.

An excellent Salon article compares the three bills.

McCain-Lieberman may suffer from weak green support, because it includes some pilot nuclear plants among its new technology provisions. But it is the real deal, worth fighting for. The Bingaman obscenity has, of course, the inside track and the full support of the Republican leadership, both in committee and in the full chamber.